John Morley - Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) Essay 9: The Expansion of England

'There is a vulgar view of politics which sinks them into a mere struggle of interests and parties, and there is a foppish kind of history which aims only at literary display, which produces delightful books hovering between poetry and prose. These perversions, according to me, come from an unnatural divorce between two subjects which belong to one another. Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.' These very just remarks are made by Mr. Seeley in a new book which everybody has been reading, and which is an extremely interesting example of that union of politics with history which its author regards as so useful or even indispensable for the successful prosecution of either history or politics. His lectures on the expansion of England contain a suggestive and valuable study of two great movements in our history, one of them the expansion of the English nation and state together by means of colonies; the other, the stranger expansion by which the vast population of India has passed under the rule of Englishmen. Mr. Seeley has in his new volume recovered his singularly attractive style and power of literary form. It underwent some obscuration in the three volumes in which the great transformation of Germany and Prussia during the Napoleonic age was not very happily grouped round a biography of Stein. But here the reader once more finds that ease, lucidity, persuasiveness, and mild gravity that were first shown, as they were probably first acquired, in the serious consideration of religious and ethical subjects. Mr. Seeley's aversion for the florid, rhetorical, and over-decorated fashion of writing history has not carried him to the opposite extreme, but it has made him seek sources of interest, where alone the serious student of human affairs would care to find them, in the magnitude of events, the changes of the fortunes of states, and the derivation of momentous consequences from long chains of antecedent causes.

The chances of the time have contributed to make Mr. Seeley's book, in one sense at least, singularly opportune, and have given to a philosophical study the actuality of a political pamphlet. The history of the struggle between England and France for Canada and for India acquires new point at a moment when the old rivalries are again too likely to be awakened in Madagascar, in Oceania, and in more than one region of Africa. The history of the enlargement of the English state, the last survivor of a family of great colonial empires, has a vivid reality at a time when Australasia is calling upon us once more to extend our borders, and take new races under our sway. The discussion of a colonial system ceases to be an abstract debate, and becomes a question of practical emergency, when a colonial convention presses the diplomacy of the mother-country and prompts its foreign policy. Mr. Seeley's book has thus come upon a tide of popular interest. It has helped, and will still further help, to swell a sentiment that was already slowly rising to full flood. History, it would seem, can speak with two voiceseven to disciples equally honest, industrious, and competent. Twenty years ago there was a Regius Professor of History at Oxford who took the same view of his study as is expressed in the words at the head of this article. He applied his mind especially to the colonial question, and came to a conclusion directly opposed to that which commends itself to the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Since then a certain reaction has set in, which events will probably show to be superficial, but of which while it lasts Mr. Seeley's speculations will have the benefit. In 1867, when the guarantee of the Canadian railway was proposed in Parliament, Mr. Cave, the member for Barnstaple, remarked that instead of giving three millions sterling with a view of separating Canada from the United States, it would be more sensible and more patriotic to give ten millions in order to unite them. Nobody protested against this remark. If it were repeated to-day there would be a shout of disapprobation. On the other hand we shall not have another proposal to guarantee a colonial railway. This temporary fluctuation in opinion is not the first instance of men cherishing the shadow after they have rid themselves of the substance, and clinging with remarkable ardour to a sentiment after they have made quite sure that it shall not inconvenience them in practice.

The Empire, by Mr. Goldwin Smith, published in 1863a masterpiece of brilliant style and finished dialectics.

Writing as a historian, Mr. Seeley exhorts us to look at the eighteenth century in a new light and from a new standpoint, which he exhibits with singular skill and power. We could only wish that he had been a little less zealous on behalf of its novelty. His accents are almost querulous as he complains of historical predecessors for their blindness to what in plain truth we have always supposed that they discerned quite as clearly as he discerns it himself. 'Our historians,' he says, 'miss the true point of view in describing the eighteenth century. They make too much of the mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about liberty. They do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia.' 'I shall venture to assert,' he proceeds in another place, 'that the main struggle of England from the time of Louis XIV. to the time of Napoleon was for the possession of the New World; and it is for want of perceiving this that most of us find that century of English history uninteresting.' The same teasing refrain runs through the book. We might be disposed to traverse Mr. Seeley's assumption that most of us do find the eighteenth century of English history uninteresting. 'In a great part of it,' Mr. Seeley assures us, 'we see nothing but stagnation. The wars seem to lead to nothing, and we do not perceive the working of any new political ideas. That time seems to have created little, so that we can only think of it as prosperous, but not as memorable. Those dim figures, George I. and George II., the long tame administrations of Walpole and Pelham, the commercial war with Spain, the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, the foolish prime minister Newcastle, the dull brawls of the Wilkes period, the miserable American wareverywhere alike we seem to remark a want of greatness, a distressing commonness and flatness in men and in affairs.' This would be very sad if it were true, but is it true? A plain man rubs his eyes in amazement at such reproaches. So far from most of us finding the eighteenth century uninteresting, as prosperous rather than memorable, as wanting in greatness, as distressing by the commonness and the flatness of its men and its affairs, we undertake to say that most of us, in the sense of most people who read the English language, know more about, and feel less flatness, and are more interested in the names of the eighteenth century than in those of all other centuries put together. If we are to talk about 'popular histories,' the writer who distances every competitor by an immeasurable distance is Macaulay. Whatever may be said about that illustrious man's style, his conception of history, his theories of human society, it is at least beyond question or denial that his